Business is good for Santa Rosa, CA-based Quattrocchi Kwok Architects (QKA), as the company recently announced plans for a new full-service office in Pleasanton, CA, effective February 1, 2018. Officials say the new downtown location in the city's Kolin Building will offer greater accessibility to its many East Bay, Peninsula and South Bay education design clients and its existing and planned projects.
“Throughout our 31-year history, we have cultivated many long-term relationships with school district clients in the rapidly growing regions in and around our new office location," said Mark Quattrocchi, QKA’s founding principal, in a news release. “The Pleasanton office will truly be an extension of the expertise we have cultivated in Santa Rosa, providing a full range of master planning, design and construction administration services for K-12 educational facilities."
David Hansen, who will head the new office, told me that as QKA grows, it is taking a strategic approach. "Pleasanton/Dublin is centralized to a large percentage of our client base and a larger pool of local architectural talent," says Hansen, LEED, AP. "Being in a better position to attract talent is one of the biggest motivators."
Hansen, whose company specializes in K-12 school design, says a lot of the business growth is fueled by a "continuing boom to the Bay Area economy, demographic trends with new generations of families repopulating areas where schools had closed, and the continuing aging of existing facilities."
"We plan to grow our Pleasanton office carefully over the first two years," says Hansen. "The vision is to have a full service team in place as soon as practical, including architects, BIM modelers, construction project managers and support staff."
The new office is set to play an integrated role in QKA’s overall operations, as the company currently has approximately 10 projects in construction and roughly 20 in various stages of development in the Pleasanton area.
"We have three large projects in the South Bay in which we serve as the architect and they also utilize our building product," says Hansen. "School districts in Morgan Hill, Cupertino and Hollister are seeing or will be seeing their new classroom facilities built in a time- and cost-effective manner using QKA’s innovative, high performance building solution called Folia."
Folia, developed with QKA partners Blach Construction and Gregory P. Luth and Associates, is a two-story pre-engineered, fully-customizable steel classroom building that offers a flexible alternative to traditionally designed and modular buildings.
In the larger Bay Area, QKA is currently working on more than one dozen large education projects, including the first new public elementary school to be built in Fremont in 25 years. The new Lila Bringhurst Elementary School is anticipated to open in 2019 and will provide adaptable 21st century learning environments equipped with the latest technology for its students.
Also notably, QKA led the design of the seismic retrofit and restoration of the Historic Alameda High School. Constructed in 1924, the 100,000-sq-ft historical landmark has stood empty since deemed unsafe in 2013. The project broke ground in April 2017 and will include 55 new classrooms and science labs for use by the district’s students.
